Rothamsted Research: 4 themes for the future

septembre 13, 2016

Rothamsted Research has released its annual report for 2015/2016, a particularly important period for the institute, which has undergone 18 months of reflection on its long-term vision and mission under new director Professor Achim Dobermann.

Interviewed in the report, Professor Dobermann says: “Overall, I am very pleased with the new vision and the initial progress made, which reinforces our primary purpose as the leading institute in the UK for integrated agricultural science.”

Professor Dobermann also stresses the urgency of producing scientific outputs which are taken up by the farming industry to tackle some of the big problems in agriculture. “We have huge problems to solve in agriculture and many of them cannot wait 20 or 30 years,” he says. “At Rothamsted we will aim to combine scientific discovery with a true innovation culture, moving faster towards translation through a leaner science approach.

“Our aim is not only to stimulate new ideas, but also to take them very quickly to prototypes that are tested and improved in an iterative fashion in collaboration with universities and industry partners in the real world. That culture will be embedded in our future research. This problem-solving approach will still be done in the context of excellent, strategic science and student-driven research projects, but it will make our research more relevant.”

Examining some of the research highlights of 2015/2016, Professor Dobermann says: “2015 was the International Year of Soils and our scientists made a number of notable advances, particularly in understanding the biological functions of soil, moving towards a more quantitative understanding of soil resilience, and exploiting metagenomics.

“There were also advances in crop health research including insights into the interactions between insects and plant disease and the genetic control of plant resistance to disease. The results of the GM wheat field trials – conducted in 2012/13 to test novel plant-signalling defence mechanisms to repel aphids – were finally published. This was an important step and also a rare occasion in the sense that what we had found to work in the laboratory did not yet work as well in the field. We believe this is important, as is our responsibility to publish such ‘negative results’, and we learnt a lot from it. The international response to this publication has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Last year also saw a world first for Rothamsted, with the introduction of a fully automatic, high-throughput, robotic, field phenotyping platform, called a field scanalyzer. The annual report says: “Scientific endeavour has provided a wealth of information about the genetics of crop plants and the potential relationships between genes and function. However, relating the genotype of a particular plant to its resulting phenotype while it grows and matures under real-life field conditions, is quite a different challenge. The field scanalyzer is a phenomenal piece of equipment that helps solve this problem.”

It comprises a large motorised measuring platform housing multiple high-tech sensors which move on a gantry just above the crop, continuously recording phenotypic data from each plant. It can work 24 hours a day throughout the season with hardware including multi-wavelength sensors, an imaging sensor to measure chlorophyll fluorescence, and a laser system for 3D reconstruction and crop height determination, making it possible to simultaneously measure plant physiology, architecture, health and function. “We are delighted to have this facility at Rothamsted,” Dr Malcolm Hawkesford tells the report. “This will revolutionize the way that agricultural research is conducted.”